Second suspect arrested for crime writer's murder

The police arrested a second suspect for involvement in the assassination of crime writer Martin Kok in Laren in 2016. The 25-year-old man from Utrecht was arrested in Den Bosch on Tuesday, NU.nl reports.

Last month the police arrested a 24-year-old man from Utrecht in the prison in Alphen aan den Rijn, where he was in custody for another crime.

Kok, 49, was gunned down in the parking lot of sex club Boccaccio in Laren on December 8th, 2016. Earlier that same day he unwittingly escaped another attempt to kill him. Video footage show a man walking up to Kok in front of a hotel in Amsterdam, with gun in hand. The weapon did not fire for unknown reasons, and the man slipped away. Kok kept walking, none the wiser.

Those were not the first attempts on Kok's life. In July 2016 a bomb was placed under Kok's car while he was eating at a restaurant in Amsterdam. The police later said that the bomb was as powerful as 40 hand grenades. In 2015 Kok was shot at while he was sleeping in his home.

Kok was a career criminal before he founded his crime blog Vlinderscrime, where he wrote about rumors from the criminal world about crimes and suspected perpetrators. Before that he committed two murders and ran an escort agency up until 2014, according to RTL Nieuws.

Early in 2016 Kok published passages from a police interrogation of criminal king pin Willem Holleeder. A court later ordered him to remove the text from his blog.